Innocence, Again

I was reading this long article on the French film Innocence and I remember that freezing December evening last year when I braved raging snow storms to reach the Music Box Theatre just in time to catch the screening. There was just one couple other than me (alone of course) who had to come to see it. I feared that they might even cancel the screening but they went ahead anyway. Actually, I didn't know about the film much because I hadn't read anything about it before and it was more because I wanted to go out in the cold and snow that I went ahead but I was pleasantly surprised, rather enthralled, by this little film. I thought it was one of the best films I saw whole of last year and it seems strange to me now why it didn't receive more mainstream critical attention and acclaim. Perhaps the new york times was to blame -- in one of her stupidest judgments its critic Manohla Dargis found elements of child pornography in it!

I thought it was an extremely sensitive, intelligent, provocative and ultimately poignant take on the flowering of sexual knowledge and the concomitant end of "innocence". One can easily take issues with her quasi-Miltonic idealization of the prelapsarian period of childhood innocence and her demonization of sex and traditional sexual roles ("all adult women are prostitutes and baby producing automatons", well it's a monstrous simplification but that's what her point boils down to ultimately) but her command over the medium and the subject and the way she creates a disorienting, other-worldly effect in the audiences was just too astonishing to ignore. Specially, the way she uses sound and lighting reminded me of David Lynch at his best. And that is one mighty praise coming from me! I had written a short post on the film before too here. There are more links at the end of the post.